About Me

I started my career building monolithic web applications, but quickly became fascinated by the challenges of scale. How do you build systems that can handle millions of users? How do you ensure reliability when everything is distributed? These questions led me down the rabbit hole of backend engineering and systems architecture.

Over the past 15+ years, I've worked at both high-growth startups and established tech companies. I was an early engineer at a fintech startup where I built the core payment processing system from the ground up. Later, I joined a larger company to work on distributed systems that handled billions of events per day.

More recently, I've become deeply interested in AI and machine learning—not as a replacement for traditional engineering, but as a powerful tool to enhance what we can build. I'm particularly excited about RAG systems, AI-powered developer tools, and intelligent observability platforms.

I'm a strong believer in simple solutions to complex problems. The best architecture is often the one that's easiest to understand and maintain. I prefer boring, proven technology over the latest hype—until the hype proves itself in production.

I also think the best way to learn is by building and sharing. That's why I write about my experiences, failures, and lessons learned. If my mistakes can help someone else avoid the same pitfalls, that's a win.

When I'm not writing code or debugging production issues, you'll find me reading technical papers, contributing to open source, or mentoring junior engineers. I'm passionate about helping others grow in their careers and giving back to the community that's taught me so much.

I also enjoy hiking, photography, and experimenting with new cooking recipes—all activities that remind me there's more to life than computers (though I do occasionally write scripts to optimize my cooking process).